Registry entry

Tanzania — BRELA Form 14a, Application for Registration of a Company

The Business Registrations and Licensing Agency's (BRELA) Form 14a, 'Application for Registration of a Company', filed pursuant to section 14(2) of the Companies Act, Cap. 212, via BRELA's Online Registration System (ORS). Opens Tanzania's Business Formation vertical (Tanzania's first schema in this registry, its 60th jurisdiction). This is a whole-of-form schema: Form 14a itself is a fixed-layout, non-repeating template (a single Applicant, a company-information block, a single Registered Office, a single free-text Business Activities block, exactly two numbered Director blocks, exactly one Company Secretary block, a single-row Authorised Share Capital table, and exactly two numbered Shareholder blocks), so no fields were descoped for repeating-group reasons. Every numbered person-block (both directors, both shareholders) is modeled as required, not optional, because the Companies Act itself — independently re-fetched this cycle from the same authority's own site — fixes these as legal minimums for every company, not just a form-printing convenience: section 186 ('Every company shall have at least two directors'), section 26/27 (a company whose membership falls below two members incurs personal liability for its officers after six months, and the Act's 'private company' definition contains no single-member carve-out), and section 187 ('Every company shall have a Secretary', mandatory for every company, not only public companies — confirmed still in force by the Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 3) Act, 2021, which eased only the professional-qualification requirement for a private company's secretary, not the requirement to have one at all). Signature/seal/stamp blocks at the end of the form (Director ×2, Company Secretary) are a physical wet-signature/attestation mechanism, not data fields, and are out of scope, consistent with this registry's treatment of physical-signature-only blocks elsewhere. This schema does not submit anything to BRELA or imply Government of Tanzania endorsement.

Registry entry

tz/brela/company-registration-form-14a

Jurisdiction
Tanzania · national
Version
1.0.0
Verification
draft

Authoritative source Form 14a, "Application for Registration of a Company", pursuant to section 14(2) of the Companies Act, Cap. 212

Machine access

Registry catalog
registry/index.jsonone record per schema id

Field reference

78 fields, read from the published schema.json, with names, types, requiredness, and validation as the document states them. The live government form remains the authoritative source.

Fields

  • trackingNumber string optional

    Application-tracking reference. Reads as a BRELA Online Registration System (ORS)-assigned reference rather than an applicant-supplied value.

  • applicationDate date required

    Application date

  • applicantNationalId string required

    Applicant — National ID

  • applicantName string required

    Applicant — Name

  • applicantGender string required

    Modeled as free text: the form prints only a blank dotted line, no enumerated option list.

  • applicantDateOfBirth date required

    Applicant — Date of birth

  • applicantNationality string required

    Applicant — Nationality

  • applicantEmail string required

    Applicant — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • applicantMobilePhoneNumbers string required

    Applicant — Mobile Phone Numbers

  • applicantCanUpdateDataInOrs boolean required

    If affirmative, this person is empowered to assign other persons who can update data in ORS, per the form's own explanatory note beneath this field.

  • companyTin string optional

    Taxpayer Identification Number, where applicable — a new company may not yet have one at the time of filing.

  • incorporationNumber string optional

    Reads as a BRELA-assigned registration reference rather than an applicant-supplied value, since it logically cannot exist before this application is granted.

  • companyName string required

    Company name

  • companyType string required

    Modeled as free text: the form prints only a blank dotted line, no enumerated option list of the company types the Companies Act, Cap. 212 recognizes.

  • incorporationDate date optional

    Reads as a BRELA-assigned date rather than an applicant-supplied value, since it logically cannot exist before this application is granted.

  • accountingDate string required

    The company's chosen financial year-end reference date (day and month, recurring annually).

  • registeredOfficeAddress string required

    Registered office

  • registeredOfficePoBox string required

    Registered office — P.O. BOX

  • registeredOfficeEmail string required

    Registered office — E-mail

    pattern
  • registeredOfficeMobilePhoneNumber string required

    Registered office — Mobile Phone Number

  • businessActivitiesDescription string required

    Description of the company's business activities. The form itself gives 4 dotted lines of writing space for this single answer (1 labeled line plus 3 blank continuation lines).

  • director1CanUpdateDataInOrs boolean required

    Director 1 — Can this person update data in ORS?

  • director1NationalIdOrPassport string required

    Director 1 — National ID/Passport No

  • director1Tin string optional

    Taxpayer Identification Number, where applicable.

  • director1Name string required

    Director 1 — Name

  • director1Gender string required

    Director 1 — Gender

  • director1DateOfBirth date required

    Director 1 — Date of birth

  • director1Nationality string required

    Director 1 — Nationality

  • director1Email string required

    Director 1 — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • director1MobilePhoneNumber string required

    Director 1 — Mobile Phone Number

  • director1ResidentialAddress string required

    Director 1 — Residential address

  • director2CanUpdateDataInOrs boolean required

    Required, not optional: the Companies Act, Cap. 212 section 186 fixes a minimum of two directors for every company, matching the form's own fixed two-director layout.

  • director2NationalIdOrPassport string required

    Director 2 — National ID/Passport No

  • director2Tin string optional

    Taxpayer Identification Number, where applicable.

  • director2Name string required

    Director 2 — Name

  • director2Gender string required

    Director 2 — Gender

  • director2DateOfBirth date required

    Director 2 — Date of birth

  • director2Nationality string required

    Director 2 — Nationality

  • director2Email string required

    Director 2 — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • director2MobilePhoneNumber string required

    Director 2 — Mobile Phone Number

  • director2ResidentialAddress string required

    Director 2 — Residential address

  • secretaryCanUpdateDataInOrs boolean required

    Required, not optional: the Companies Act, Cap. 212 section 187 mandates a Secretary for every company (public or private), a requirement the Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 3) Act, 2021 preserved, easing only a private-company secretary's professional-qualification requirement.

  • secretaryNationalIdOrPassport string required

    Company Secretary — National ID/Passport No

  • secretaryTin string optional

    Taxpayer Identification Number, where applicable.

  • secretaryName string required

    Company Secretary — Name

  • secretaryGender string required

    Company Secretary — Gender

  • secretaryDateOfBirth date required

    Company Secretary — Date of birth

  • secretaryNationality string required

    Company Secretary — Nationality

  • secretaryEmail string required

    Company Secretary — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • secretaryMobilePhoneNumber string required

    Company Secretary — Mobile Phone Number

  • secretaryResidentialAddress string required

    Company Secretary — Residential address

  • authorisedShareCapitalTypeOfShares string required

    Authorised Share Capital — Type of Shares

  • authorisedShareCapitalClassOfShares string required

    Authorised Share Capital — Class of shares

  • authorisedShareCapitalTotalNumberOfShares integer required

    Authorised Share Capital — Total Number of shares

    range: 1–∞
  • authorisedShareCapitalAggregateNominalValue number required

    Denominated in Tanzanian Shillings, per the table's own printed Currency column (fixed to 'TZS', not a fill-in cell).

    range: 0–∞
  • authorisedShareCapitalTotalValueTzs number required

    The table's own bottom 'Total' row, denominated in Tanzanian Shillings per its printed 'TZS' label.

    range: 0–∞
  • shareholder1NationalIdOrPassport string required

    Shareholder 1 — National ID/Passport No

  • shareholder1Name string required

    Shareholder 1 — Name

  • shareholder1Gender string required

    Shareholder 1 — Gender

  • shareholder1DateOfBirth date required

    Shareholder 1 — Date of birth

  • shareholder1Nationality string required

    Shareholder 1 — Nationality

  • shareholder1Email string required

    Shareholder 1 — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • shareholder1MobilePhoneNumber string required

    Shareholder 1 — Mobile Phone Number

  • shareholder1ResidentialAddress string required

    Shareholder 1 — Residential address

  • shareholder1TypeOfSharesTaken string required

    Shareholder 1 — Type of shares taken

  • shareholder1ClassOfShares string required

    Shareholder 1 — Class of shares

  • shareholder1NumberOfShares integer required

    Shareholder 1 — Number of shares

    range: 1–∞
  • shareholder2NationalIdOrPassport string required

    Required, not optional: the Companies Act, Cap. 212 sections 26-27 treat two members as the ordinary minimum for a company (no single-member carve-out is defined in this Act), matching the form's own fixed two-shareholder layout.

  • shareholder2Name string required

    Shareholder 2 — Name

  • shareholder2Gender string required

    Shareholder 2 — Gender

  • shareholder2DateOfBirth date required

    Shareholder 2 — Date of birth

  • shareholder2Nationality string required

    Shareholder 2 — Nationality

  • shareholder2Email string required

    Shareholder 2 — E-mail Address

    pattern
  • shareholder2MobilePhoneNumber string required

    Shareholder 2 — Mobile Phone Number

  • shareholder2ResidentialAddress string required

    Shareholder 2 — Residential address

  • shareholder2TypeOfSharesTaken string required

    Shareholder 2 — Type of shares taken

  • shareholder2ClassOfShares string required

    Shareholder 2 — Class of shares

  • shareholder2NumberOfShares integer required

    Shareholder 2 — Number of shares

    range: 1–∞

Verification record

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice.

Current claim

  • status: draft
  • verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
  • verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-15

Why this schema and why now (GOV-3113)

GOV-3113 is a child issue of GOV-3109, itself delegated during the GOV-3104 "GovSchema Standard Research" cycle (Pakistan's FBR IT-1B, which opened Pakistan's Taxes vertical). GOV-3109's own scouting pass found this Tanzanian BRELA form — HTTP 200, no login/CAPTCHA gate, a genuine multi-page native text-layer PDF — as a strong, unauthored candidate, and delegated it as GOV-3113 rather than authoring it inline. This cycle re-derived everything from scratch rather than trusting that prior scouting note as-is, per this registry's standing convention.

Sources examined

  • Document (id, version): tz/brela/company-registration-form-14a / 1.0.0
  • Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
  • Authority: Business Registrations and Licensing Agency ("BRELA").
  • Primary source:
    • Form file: https://www.brela.go.tz/uploads/documents/sw-1621406129-Form%2014a.pdf — fetched directly this cycle: HTTP 200, content-type application/pdf, 263,198 bytes, sha256 d0535d301c8764d40a4a0abec116f4c00e07d2ce544f489908788b7b1633fc35.
    • A genuine 3-page native text-layer PDF, confirmed via pdfjs-dist's getTextContent() (not a scanned image); getAnnotations() returned zero widgets on all 3 pages — no /AcroForm, a fill-in-the-blank dotted-line template, not an interactive PDF form.
    • Every line of every page was extracted and read in full (line-grouped by y-coordinate, then cross-checked against a raw x/y per-glyph dump).
    • The AUTHORISED SHARE CAPITAL table (page 2) required a further coordinate-level pass: a 2.5×-scale node-canvas render of page 2 was pixel-scanned for dark horizontal/vertical rule lines, locating 6 column boundaries at x = 1, 145, 295, 478, 710, 941, 1227px and 3 row boundaries. This confirmed the table's 2-line-wrapped header ("Type of / Shares", "Class of / shares", "Total Number of / shares", "Value", "Aggregate nominal / value", "Currency" with a fixed, already-printed "TZS" directly beneath it) sits over one blank data row and one further "Total" row (whose own label sits inside the 4th column's x-range, with a second fixed "TZS" beneath the Currency column). Modeled as 5 fill-in fields (type of shares, class of shares, total number of shares, aggregate nominal value, total value) — the "Currency" cells are a printed constant (TZS), not applicant input, so no separate currency field was added.
    • The SHAREHOLDER 2 block (page 3) prints its field labels without the trailing dotted-blank glyphs every other block on the form has (e.g. "National ID/Passport No:" with no …………… after it, vs. Shareholder 1's "National ID/Passport No: …………………………………………………………………. on page 2). A Warning: TT: undefined function: 32 surfaced from pdfjs-dist's font-glyph path generator while rendering that page — traced to character code 32 (space), not to any of the printed labels, ruling out silent text loss as the explanation. Treated as a pagination/layout artifact (the block ran out of vertical room for the dots, not a content difference): Shareholder 2's field set was cross-checked field-for-field against the identically-labeled Shareholder 1 block rather than relying on the missing dots.
    • Full-text grep of the extraction for attach, enclos, copy of, certificate, and document returned zero matches — the form itself prints no enclosures/supporting-documents list anywhere in its 3 pages, unlike e.g. Pakistan's SECP Form-1. documents[] is therefore not modeled in this schema, rather than fabricating a generic placeholder entry.
  • Corroborating source 1 — the Companies Act itself, Cap. 212 (also BRELA-hosted): https://www.brela.go.tz/uploads/documents/sw-1602521545-COMPANIES%20ACT%20(CAP.%20212).pdf — fetched directly this cycle: HTTP 200, sha256 9c75e2d0623454942a535e5cddd22898683da877c3f7cbfd5e9a81f1196ef0fd, 336 pages, extracted via pdfjs-dist and grepped for cardinality rules. Found and read in full: These three sections together directly explain the form's own fixed layout — exactly two Director blocks, exactly two Shareholder blocks, and exactly one Company Secretary block — as statutory minimums, not merely a print-space convention. This reversed an initial UK/Kenya-style assumption (where private companies may have a single director/member and no mandatory secretary) that the second-occurrence blocks should be modeled optional.
    • Section 186: "Every company shall have at least two directors."
    • Sections 26–27: a company whose membership falls below two members exposes its officers to personal liability for the company's debts after six months of continuing to trade below that threshold; the Act's own definition of "private company" (s.27) contains no single-member carve-out.
    • Section 187: "Every company shall have a Secretary" — stated as a blanket requirement, not limited to public companies; s.187(2)'s extra qualification-standard language is specific to public company secretaries, not a carve-out from the base requirement.
  • Corroborating source 2 — a 2021 amendment note: https://breakthroughattorneys.co.tz/amendment-to-the-companies-act-cap-212/ — fetched directly this cycle: HTTP 200. Describes the Written Laws (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 3) Act, 2021's changes to section 14(2) of the Companies Act — the exact section this form itself cites ("Pursuant to section 14(2) Companies Act Cap. 212") — adding National Identification Number, Taxpayer Identification Number ("where applicable"), email address, telephone, and passport (for foreigners) as required particulars. This matches the form's own field set closely and is the basis for modeling every TIN field (company, and each director's/secretary's own TIN) as required: false: the amendment's own qualifier signals a TIN will not always exist at filing time. It also confirms the 2021 amendment preserved, not repealed, the mandatory Secretary requirement — it eased only a private company secretary's professional-qualification standard relative to a public company's.

Scope decisions

Form 14a is a fixed, non-repeating template — every block on it (Applicant, Company Information, Registered Office, Business Activities, both numbered Directors, the Company Secretary, the Authorised Share Capital table, and both numbered Shareholders) appears exactly once or exactly twice, printed directly on the form itself. No fields were descoped for repeating-group reasons (unlike, e.g., Nepal's OCR or Pakistan's SECP schemas), so this version models the whole form:

  1. Both Director blocks and both Shareholder blocks are modeled required: true, not optional, per the Companies Act corroboration above (ss. 26–27, 186). The Company Secretary block is likewise modeled required: true, per s.187.
  2. Every TIN field is required: false ("where applicable", per the 2021 amendment note corroborating source).
  3. trackingNumber, incorporationNumber, and incorporationDate are modeled required: false. Unlike every other blank on the form, these read as BRELA/ORS-system-assigned references rather than applicant input — an incorporation number/date logically cannot exist before the very registration this form applies for is granted.
  4. companyType and both Gender fields are modeled as free-text string, not enum — the form prints only a blank dotted line for each, with no accompanying option list, matching this registry's established practice of not fabricating enum values a source does not itself enumerate.
  5. businessActivitiesDescription is modeled as a single field, even though the form gives 4 dotted lines of writing space (1 labeled line plus 3 blank continuation lines) — this is continuation space for one free-text answer, not 4 distinct labeled fields.
  6. The Authorised Share Capital table is modeled as 5 fields (type of shares, class of shares, total number of shares, aggregate nominal value, total value), reflecting the single blank data row the table's own printed structure provides (see coordinate analysis above). The table's "Currency" column, fixed to TZS in both the header and the Total row, is documented in each amount field's own description rather than modeled as a separate currency field, since it is a printed constant, not applicant input.
  7. The end-of-form Director/Company-Secretary signature, date, and seal-or-stamp lines are out of scope — a physical wet-signature/seal attestation mechanism, not data fields, consistent with this registry's treatment of physical-signature-only blocks elsewhere (e.g. Pakistan's SECP Form-1 witness-signature exclusion).
  8. No documents[] is modeled — the form's 3 pages print no enclosures/attachments list and no "attach"/"copy of" instruction anywhere (confirmed by a full-text grep of the extraction), so no documents[] entry is fabricated. documents is optional per spec/v0.3/govschema.schema.json's own top-level required[] list, and several existing schemas in this registry omit it for the same reason.

Conformance fixtures (Phase 3)

6 fixtures committed under conformance/tz/brela/company-registration-form-14a/1.0.0/: 1 valid scenario (a private company with two directors — the second not empowered to update ORS data — a company secretary, and two shareholders splitting 100,000 authorised shares 60,000/40,000) plus 5 mutation-control fixtures, each derived from the valid fixture by a single targeted mutation. All 6 were run against a from-scratch, ephemeral field-by-field conformance checker (derived directly from this schema's own fields[]/required/ validation rules, not committed to the repo) before being finalized:

  • valid-two-director-two-shareholder-with-secretary.json0 errors.
  • mutation-control-missing-required-field.json (drops companyName) — exactly 1 error.
  • mutation-control-invalid-date-format.json (sets applicantDateOfBirth to 12/06/1985, not ISO 8601) — exactly 1 error.
  • mutation-control-negative-share-count.json (sets shareholder1NumberOfShares to -500, violating minimum: 1) — exactly 1 error.
  • mutation-control-invalid-email-pattern.json (sets director1Email to "not-an-email") — exactly 1 error.
  • mutation-control-missing-second-director-name.json (drops director2Name, the statutory-minimum-grounded second director block) — exactly 1 error, confirming the second Director block is enforced as required, not optional.

An inaccuracy caught before committing

An early draft treated the second Director block, the second Shareholder block, and the Company Secretary block as required: false by default, reasoning from UK/Kenya-style Companies Act norms where a private company may have a single director/member and no mandatory secretary. Fetching and reading the Companies Act, Cap. 212 itself (the same BRELA-hosted primary source) directly contradicted this: s.186 fixes a minimum of two directors for every company, ss.26–27 treat two members as the ordinary minimum with no single-member carve-out, and s.187 mandates a Secretary for every company. All three blocks were corrected to required: true before this version was finalized.

Structural validation

  • node tools/validate.mjs registry/tz/brela/company-registration-form-14a/1.0.0/schema.jsonok.
  • node tools/validate-ajv.mjs registry/tz/brela/company-registration-form-14a/1.0.0/schema.json (ajv 2020-12 against spec/v0.3) — ok.
  • Full-registry re-run after adding this document: node tools/validate.mjs470/470 (up from 469/469 before this document); node tools/validate-ajv.mjs470/470.
  • node tools/verify-sources.mjs — clean (no FAIL/WARN on this document's changed files).
  • npm run build-index re-run in tools/govschema-client/ to regenerate registry-index.json with this document included.

Maturity

structural-reference: the source PDF's own printed structure is fully transcribed from the genuine, currently-served official statutory form (a fill-in-the-blank template, not an interactive form), corroborated against the Companies Act, Cap. 212 itself for cardinality, but no live filing through BRELA's Online Registration System (ORS) was attempted. GovSchema is an independent, non-profit standards body and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Government of Tanzania or BRELA.

View the raw record (VERIFICATION.md)

Version history

  • 1.0.0 draft latest this page has verification record schema.json

Independent and non-affiliated

GovSchema is an independent, open-source project. This reference is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by Business Registrations and Licensing Agency or any government. The authoritative source is always the live government form and its official instructions.